My Food Memories: Shakirat Akinosho reflects on a childhood in Nigeria

Shakirat Akinosho shares with Victoria Stewart her memories of the food she grew up eating in Nigeria
Instagram/SOOP
Victoria Stewart27 December 2017

Having grown up in western and south western Nigeria, Shakirat Akinosho has lived in the UK for 16 years and is currently working as a chef’s assistant in London, following completion of a 10-month culinary programme run by an organisation called Stories On Our Plate (SOOP) that enables chefs with refugee status to move into the food and catering industry here.

In July 2017 SOOP supported Akinosho to run her first supperclub, held at the London Cooking Project in Battersea, where she cooked and shared stories around some of the food she grew up eating. Here she shares her favourite dishes from home.

Growing up in a polygamous family of 10 in Nigeria, Shakirat Akinosho and her siblings would move around regularly with their father to coincide with his job. When they had a dining room table, she remembers it was always he “who would sit at the head of the table - and we would all sit around him.”

After moving house, however, the living room often became the most popular space for everyone to share food together: “some people like to eat around a dining room table, but for us it was not compulsory!” she laughs.

At that point, the family would divide into age groups, where those aged three or four would be served together, followed by those aged five to 10, ending with the adults. As meat was popular, and it was a big family, often her father would have to divide it up to avoid “everybody screaming and fighting.”

Indeed meat back then, she explains, “was something special, and we’d have beef or chicken - there was no pork as we are Muslims”. Boiling was the preferred method for cooking beef because, "back home, if you serve uncooked or pink meat, nobody’s going to eat it!” she emphasizes. Chicken, meanwhile, would be the thing they would normally cook for special occasions, wherepuon “we’d just take one from out the back and then kill it just before we wanted to cook. It was so good.”

2017 cookbooks - in pictures

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Chicken with rice - always fried in vegetable oil in a saucepan “because we didn’t have an oven then 15 years ago” - was a favourite dish. For this her mother would use lots of spices, garlic, onions, and cloves.

While it was Akinosho’s mother who did most of the cooking for their large family, she would often assist her in the kitchen, picking up skills as she went. Hosting her first supperclub last year, Akinosho was keen to serve the kind of Nigerian food that her mum used to make for her, such as a “delicious” stew incorporating spinach, iru and dried crayfish. “This is really very special and my mum’s favourite dish - I’d always look forward to it.”

To make it, her mother preferred to use the family’s stone hand grinder - “she believed that using your hands was better than the machine” - whereas many others would take their peppers or vegetables to a local grinder. This is something she has continued today, when cooking for guests.

The best way to combine all the flavours, she advises, is to grind the ingredients - things like peppers and onions - on their own and then put them together. After this “you fry the onions, ginger and garlic, add the crayfish or any kind of fish, and let the flavours come together. Then you add the pepper. If you want it watery, you can use chicken or beef stock and cook it down, and after that you can parboil your vegetables for about five minutes. Growing up, we’d often have a Nigerian kind of spinach, and about six types of green vegetables that they don’t have in the UK, then we’d eat the whole thing with country rice or cassava.”

The west African staple, ebà, made from cassava, was also a popular accompaniment - “a little bit like pounded yam,” she remembers. Akinosho’s mother would soak the cassava for four days, before having it ground by someone in the village, which would make it easier to be compressed and dried. Next she would pass it through a sieve, and fry it in a pan or on a naked flame. “Then it’s really good,” she enthuses.

Her all-time top dish for serving at parties was a Nigerian signature dish called moi moi, like a bean puree roll, which “everybody always looked forward to having with jollof rice. You can have it on its own or with bread.”

Akinosho makes moi moi by peeling and soaking red or black eyed beans and blending these with fresh red pepper. Next she suggests adding extra flavours like egg or fish, before adding stock or vegetables - or even having it plain with salt - and wrapping it inside a big leaf “where all the flavour will build up. These days a lot of people don’t use the leaf, as they use disposable food bags or plastic, but it’s always steamed somehow. After that you can keep it in the fridge for a week, or freeze it and warm it up in time for a party. It’s a really good, very typical Nigerian dish.”

“I still love making these now, and did it for my supperclubs as they’re some of my favourite dishes and have lovely memories.”

As for the question of whether she will host more supperclubs in London, she says she is currently “trying to settle down here now - but once I have sorted some things out in my brain and can think straight and focus on cooking for people, I would love to do another one soon.”

To hear more about SOOP’s training programmes, or to book a supperclub, visit facebook.com/soopstories/

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